


we don't know why, we just are

by ongreenergrasses



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (he doesn't show up but he and his Judaism are mentioned), Disabled Character of Color, Disabled Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Fluff, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Hanukkah, Jewish Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Jewish Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Jewish Characters, Jewish Identity, Nonbinary Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Nonbinary Character, Team as Family, cheers lads, in fact this fic is composed almost entirely of my favorite self indulgent headcanons, the infamous Latke Discourse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:02:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28122804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ongreenergrasses/pseuds/ongreenergrasses
Summary: in which Nile and Andy travel together, the Great Latke Discourse comes to an immortal found family near you, and nothing hurts.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 70
Collections: Festival of Lights Fest





	we don't know why, we just are

**Author's Note:**

> for mmes ashley and anna, who have been incredibly supportive and excited about my weirdly niche headcanons, and also for stacey and her wonderful shop
> 
> chag hanukkah sameach!

Nile really liked Andy.

Andy and Nile had been together, traveling and doing jobs, pretty much since the beginning. Joe and Nicky had split right after London as they’d obviously needed alone time, which Nile understood and didn’t begrudge them for in the least. So Nile had fully started out her time being immortal with just Andy, and even after a few months, while they still met up with the guys for jobs and holidays and sometimes just vacations, they mostly kept to their pre-established pairs.

Nile had always liked people that had no tolerance for bullshit, and Andy was definitely one of those people. Now especially, with the whole immortality thing and the way Nile’s life had turned completely upside down, she wanted people to be straight with her. The guys were nice to her and fun to hang out with and she liked them, she just sometimes wanted to scream because they just – they were almost too normal and too nice.

Nile was happy and she loved her life, even though it had taken her the last two years to get there, but also sometimes she hated it, and she needed to yell about how much she hated everything and how awful the world was and how much she missed her family. She didn’t really like it when people were nice to her at those times, she just wanted someone to be direct with her and listen to her. Andy’s inability to make small talk and inability to be anything but completely direct, all of the time, was refreshing.

Also, Nile needed her family to be truly happy, she’d always known that, and her being cut off from her family permanently without any chance to say goodbye or see them one last time made her miserable, at least at first. Andy understood that.

She learned a lot of weird shit about Andy pretty quickly, probably because Andy was guarded but they also weren’t afraid to answer Nile’s questions. That’s how Nile learned why Andy usually camped. 

At first Nile had felt a little bit weird about the camping thing, a little bit hesitant about always sleeping outside and not having running water, if nothing else, but soon she realized that it was pretty…fun? Fun was the best word for it. Andy had a pretty good range of comfortable tents and yurts, and Nile had never really been one for hotels anyway. She liked them well enough for a couple days, but now she constantly felt enough like an imposter in the world that the added impersonality of hotels just made Nile feel uncomfortable, like she was about to crawl out of her skin.

But when they camped together, they laughed and sparred (no more breaking bones) and did campfires with smores, because Andy’s sweet tooth knew no bounds, and Nile learned how to put up every type of tent she could imagine and how to cook an impressive range of meals on an open fire, and Andy taught her all the constellations they knew on several continents with several different names – Greek names, constellations they called “Yusuf’s”, and constellations that were so old that Andy didn’t remember where they had learned them, or who they had learned them from. In return, Nile made Andy a bunch of Spotify playlists gave them book recommendations, and taught Andy how to do her hair, because she was certainly not going to keep to just one or two hairstyles for the next however many millennia.

Anyway, the camping question was one that Nile had learned the answer to early on. “Why do you always camp?” Nile had asked one night. They were in Australia at the time, because Nile had always wanted to see the Great Wall of China and the Great Barrier Reef among other things, so Australia was the second stop on what Nile was privately calling her ‘Impossible Bucket List Tour’. They had both sprawled out on either side of the fire, watching the stars and taking advantage of the smoke pouring off the fire to avoid the mosquitos.

“Eh,” Andy had said. “I prefer it. We camped for a long time, I never got used to the houses thing. Joe and Nicky have got a bunch of those houses but I never saw the need. I’ve got a couple, one in Vietnam, one in – I don’t know what country now. Where I’m from. I keep those pretty clean. It’s just that I grew up differently from them.”

Nile had visited the house that was in the area Andy was from. It was somewhere in Eastern Europe, but unfortunately Nile’s memory wasn’t any better than Andy’s in terms of which country it was located in. She knew that Joe and Nicky visited the house more frequently than Andy did to maintain the deed to the house and do the repairs. Nile doubted that Andy had ever learned exactly how to take care of a house – they’d never needed to.

“Why don’t you buy more houses? One on every continent or something.”

“I have my storage lockers.” Andy kept all their tents (of which they had seemingly hundreds) in caves and storage lockers, of which they also had hundreds. “Plus I don’t have the money.”

“You don’t have the money?”

“Nope.”

“You’ve been alive for 7000 years, you’ve got 7000 years of money.”

“I’m not 7000 years old,” Andy groused, “and no. I gave it all away.”

“What?”

“I don’t need it,” Andy said. “I’m fine with camping. And I keep enough money for myself. I can eat, I’ve got clothes, we can buy the things we need, we can travel. Isn’t this enough?” They pointed up at the stars. “Better view than what you’d get inside a house. I don’t need the extra stuff the guys like to have, so I just give the money away. To charities sometimes, like they do, but a lot of times I just give cash to people I see. Or donate to those campaigns on Gofundme.”

Nile had been practically speechless. She’d had a reductive view of Andy when she’d first met them, she’d known that, but this was something that Nile hadn’t anticipated. Andy had seemed so jaded, so angry, so weary. Nile hadn’t been able to reconcile the person that she had met in Afghanistan with the person across the fire from her – who was donating all of their money? Who was investing in mutual aid? Nile had been dividing her pay every time they all took a job, keeping half for herself and contributing half to the families in her old neighborhood, and she knew that Joe had a long list of charities to donate to that he kept in the front of his journal, but Andy?

“Who else do you give it to?”

“Whoever I want,” Andy said. “Vet offices sometimes. To help horses.”

Nile hummed in response. “Didn’t know you liked horses.”

“Quýnh bought me a horse one time,” Andy said wistfully, “but she got pissed off if I kept it in the house, so that’s another reason I liked camping more. Horses are harder to have around now, everything’s so crowded.”

Andy still kept pretty quiet about Quýnh but sometimes they’d bring up things like that – good memories, small details. Joe and Nicky hadn’t ever told Nile that Andy was in love with Quýnh, they hadn’t needed to. Quýnh was the only thing Andy was ever reticent about.

“If you want,” Nile said finally, “My mom’s church is renovating. I bet they could use some extra cash.”

“Hmmm,” Andy said. “Could I borrow your phone?”

The next day when they were hanging out at a gas station, hitchhiking back down to Brisbane, Nile had checked the website of her mom’s church. (She’d been livestreaming the services whenever she had time and good enough Internet. Maybe it was risky but every time she watched, she saw her mom and her brother sitting in their normal pew, heard the singing, saw her old pastor, and things hurt a little bit less.) The fundraising goal had been met the last night thanks to a large charitable donation by ‘A’.

It didn’t surprise Nile, not really, but that was in hindsight the last piece of the puzzle that clicked in and solidified for her that Andy – even though she had thought she knew a little bit about Andy, and spent almost every waking hour for almost two years with them, maybe she didn’t know them at all.

* * *

They had been making their way up through Canada, driving in a truck that made a bad rattling sound every time Andy shifted between third and fourth gear and sleeping either in the covered truck bed or in a tent Andy had introduced as an ‘Arctic oven’, which contained a stove for warmth. That particular evening, they’d been trying to push on to some city, the name of which Nile had forgotten, but Nile eventually said, “I’m sick of driving, can we stop,” and Andy had just shrugged and pulled over. They’d dragged out the tent that night – it was snowing too much for them to really sleep in the back of the truck, even with the cover on it.

It was a weird trip, though. Andy called Joe and Nicky almost every night. Joe was ‘going through something’, as Andy had put it, and Andy was obviously worried about him, but it still didn’t make sense to Nile why they were traveling so fast. If Andy had thought it was an emergency, they would’ve just flown instead of making the drive.

“Why are we moving so fast?” Nile finally asked around a mouthful of baked beans. Camping in the snow meant their culinary options were limited. She was ready to get back to a house for a bit, if for nothing else but the kitchen.

Andy waved a hand dismissively from where they were sitting on one of the camp beds, mending a hole in one of their shirts. Joe and Nile both appreciated fashion and Nile was just thankful that she had someone on her side that would go shopping with her, as she had long since learned that Nicky and Andy’s wardrobes were almost entirely composed of clothes that came in 3 packs from Target and were repaired over and over until the fabric itself rotted. “Want to get there before Hanukkah starts is all.”

“I didn’t know the guys were Jewish,” Nile said.

“They’re not. I am.”

Nile nearly choked on her beans. “Last time we talked about this, I thought God didn’t exist.”

“God doesn’t exist,” Andy agreed conversationally. “Still Jewish, and Hanukkah’s a good holiday.”

“Alright,” Nile said finally. “I think you’re going to need to explain the timeline of this to me.”

Andy made eye contact with her but also didn’t put down their mending. It clearly was not going to be a long conversation.

“I can’t really explain it to you,” Andy said. “I forget some things. But their calendar makes sense, I use that one and I have for as long as I can remember. And I don’t know how I became Jewish or why, if I lived in Judaea with them at the beginning or if I converted later or if it was because someone important to me was Jewish. But I know that I am.”

“Huh,” Nile said. “So do you pray, or go to temple, or…”

“I don’t practice the religion. Although I guess, maybe I do. But it’s hard to tell what’s the religion and what’s the culture. I’m – it’s hard to explain. I don't remember much from when I was a child but we were organized by tribes or clans, I think you’d call them? My mother was the leader of ours. We weren’t all related by blood, but we were still united. Judaism is like that. A group of people that you belong to, you’re not just united by the religion or any one thing. I’m older than almost any of the things Jewish people do now. I know God’s name, I’m the only person still alive who’s heard it spoken and remembers it. I made sure I wouldn’t forget that.”

“Did you ever want to tell anyone God’s name?” Nile couldn’t even conceptualize it – God’s name?

“I can’t. Only certain people can say it, and I’m not one of them.” Andy dropped their focus back to their shirt. “But being Jewish – the one thing that unifies all the Jewish people is living a Jewish life, following the principles set out for the Jewish people. And I try to do that.”

“A Jewish life,” Nile said slowly, rolling the words around in her head. She had no idea what that entailed. Andy shrugged and tied off the thread, setting the now mended shirt aside.

“We’ll make it up there in time. The guys like celebrating it, it’s a nice holiday. Can I use your phone to call them?” Andy was constantly borrowing Nile's phone, they seemed to have some weird aversion to phones of their own. 

Nile tossed Andy her phone and Andy ducked outside to make the call, even though Nile had told them many times that she couldn’t understand a word of their conversations. Nile was learning a bunch of languages but right now she spoke to Andy in English and communicated with the others when they were all together in only slightly dated Italian. Andy spoke to the guys in a different language, something older. 

The next day, Nile used the hours when she wasn’t driving to google Judaism and what exactly a Jewish life contained. Pursuing justice, giving to charity, advocacy. Andy definitely did those things, albeit in their blunt and occasionally brutal way. “Thanks for telling me about this,” Nile said once they had stopped to trade off driving. “Being Jewish, and your Jewish life.” 

“Hmm,” Andy said, hopping into the passenger seat and immediately turning up the radio. They squeezed Nile’s hand twice before they handed Nile one of the enormous gas station coffees they had bought, though, so that was something.

It took them two more days before they got to the house Joe and Nicky were staying in, a rickety one that had been built upwards rather than out. Nile counted at least four stories, maybe five.

It was already dark and snowing (although it seemed like it was always dark this far north) and Andy was out of the truck like a shot, leaving Nile with the task of grabbing their bags and plugging in the car and pulling the stained duvet over the truck’s hood to keep the engine warm. She stumbled over a rogue piece of wood that was inexplicably in front of the door and nearly cracked her head open when she tripped over a brick in the entryway, but she managed to avoid any injuries and kicked off her shoes before heading upstairs.

“Nile! Nile, come set the table!” Nile blinked a couple times. Switching languages wasn’t easy for her, she didn’t think it was easy for anyone but maybe it would get easier once she got older. She had once described it to Andy like her brain was switching tracks like a train would, every time she started thinking in a new one it took a couple minutes for her to click over.

“What a welcome,” she said once she’d gathered her thoughts, and rounded the corner into the kitchen. Nicky was sitting on the counter next to Andy, who was grating something ferociously (it was apparently possible to grate things ferociously), and banging his heels into the cabinet door seemingly just to elicit irritated grumbling from Joe, who was laying underneath a mountain of blankets on the couch. “And I don’t see you setting the table.”

“I live here,” Nicky said, taking a drink of whatever was in the steaming mug next to him. “I set the table every day.”

“You’re so rude to our guests,” Joe said, pushing himself up to a seat so as to better hug Nile as she walked around the couch to greet him. “I’d help you, but - ”

“Yusuf,” Nicky said, the warning clear in his voice, “you will stay on that couch or so help me - ”

“I’m fine,” Joe insisted, but Nile could see how his jaw clenched just from the work of sitting upright and how worn around the edges he looked, both of which proved that he was clearly not fine. “Did you and Andy have a good time camping?”

“It was pretty fun,” Nile said, going into the kitchen to grab some plates and briefly detouring to give Nicky a hug. He dropped his head down to rest on her shoulder just briefly, the only tell of how exhausted he was. “I’m sick of beans, but Andy taught me how to take care of a truck in the cold. And they know all the good radio stations.”

“She’s more grateful for me than you two,” Andy said, still menacingly grating what Nile now saw was one of a veritable mountain of potatoes. “She has the correct amounts of awe about my wisdom.”

“Yes, such wisdom,” Nicky said. “Look what Joe found at Stacey’s shop.” He shoved a box across the counter to rest next to Andy’s elbow.

“You have got to stop going into her store,” Andy said, but their voice was fond enough that it was clear it wasn’t an admonishment. “Soon enough she’s going to notice you haven’t aged a day in the past decade.”

“She loves me, though,” Joe called. “And we had to wear masks anyway so it wasn’t like she saw our faces.”

“Stacey is going to figure it out sometime,” Andy said, picking up the box. Nile peeked at the label – they were Hanukkah candles, clearly rather high quality and from what Nile immediately clocked as one of those fancy alternative stores that sold designer wool scarves and Polish dishware and things like that. “How expensive were these, they’re made out of organic beeswax or some shit.”

“Nothing but the best for you, boss,” Nicky said, leaning over and planting an exaggerated kiss on Andy’s cheek. Nile had been with them for long enough that they all let their guard down around her, which now also meant that there were next level amounts of sibling antics, especially between Andy and Nicky. At first it had made Nile miss her brother, but after the time Nicky managed to kick the chair out from under Andy right as they sat down and Andy chased him around the room until they caught him in a headlock, it just made Nile a) happy that she was no longer the one getting pranked and b) feel disgustingly fond of both of them, to the point that she felt it welling up in her throat.

“Joe, will you eat latkes?”

“Although my joints plague me, I am still breathing,” Joe said drolly from his place on the couch. “Yes, I will eat them. Nile, we expect you to eat them at the rate that Booker would, Andy has not mastered the idea of moderation.”

“You may be an invalid for now but I will still stab you where you lie,” Andy said. Nile dug around in the drawer for silverware.

“Who taught you to make latkes, Andy? Those can’t be as old as you.”

“Not sure,” Andy said tersely. Nile knew well enough by now to know that Andy wasn’t being short because they were irritated with her, but instead because they were concentrating intently on something. The object of their focus seemed to be the amount of oil they were pouring into a pan on the stove. Nicky was watching the latke creating process with intense interest, but also with the wariness of someone who had been hit with a hot spatula too many times. “Probably Book, he showed me a lot of the ways I celebrate Jewish stuff now.”

“Booker?”

“Yeah, he’s Jewish.”

Nile dropped the plates she was carrying onto the table with a clatter. “Since when?”

“Probably since birth,” Andy said, “although to be fair I never really asked. He was just excited when he found out I was Jewish. He taught me all this shit, the latkes and the new holidays and the rituals.”

“Andy likes their rituals,” Joe chimed in.

“I do. We learned about the latkes specifically in Russia, that was a good addition.”

“Is that part of why Booker got so messed up by immortality? Everything he saw as a Jewish man?”

There was the distinct sound of someone being smacked with a spoon from the kitchen. “ _Nicolò,_ ” Andy scolded. “Probably,” they added. “It wasn’t – well. It was shit for him in France, and then it was a little less shitty, but then things got really bad. Maybe we’re just more used to it, but it’s never easy to see that type of persecution, let alone a genocide happening against your people.”

“It doesn’t get easier,” Joe added from the couch. “To watch it happening.”

“This had better not be what I have to look forward to,” Nile said. She already knew about persecution, she thought, and oppression. And systemic discrimination. She knew more about it, or at least knew about it in a different way, than they did.

“On the whole the world has improved, though,” Andy said. “Here, these are done, take them over.” They shoved another plate, this one piled high with latkes, into Nile’s hands. “Since you’re a rookie you’re a crucial part of this next part of the tradition.”

“No,” Joe groaned, “no, Nile, don’t listen to her.”

“Booker,” Andy continued, “seems to think that sour cream is the superior topping. An erroneous assumption that I have yet to correct.”

“I’m on your side, Andy,” Nicky said. He had moved over to the couch, offering his arm so Joe could use it to lever himself upright and onto his feet. “Applesauce is superior.”

“Their judgment has been rotted by their inability to resist sugar,” Joe said, winking at her. “Sour cream is the best topping. Booker and I know the truth.”

“I have faith in your taste, Nile,” Andy said, which really was a truly frightening statement the longer Nile thought about it.

“Your taste is something I don’t always want to emulate, Andy,” Nile said, and Joe clapped her hard on the back.

“See, she’s got her head on straight. I need someone to back me up for these long coming years.”

“Be quiet and eat,” Andy said, swatting at the back of Joe’s head and bringing the box of candles along with what looked to be an extremely old tin menorah (Nile had seen plenty of those in her friends’ windows) to set in the middle of the table. “Lighter?” Nicky dug one out of his pocket and slid it across the table. Andy grabbed a tea towel off the counter behind themselves and draped it over their head, quickly setting up the candles.

Nile pulled deep on the strings of her memory, because she’d said this blessing for years, many years ago. She’d always gone to Hanukkah at her best friend throughout elementary school’s house, a kid named Danny. She had the tiniest glimpse of a memory, him explaining the difference between Ethiopian synagogues and Ashkenazi synagogues to her, and her explaining the difference between Black churches and white churches to him. 

It turned out she remembered the blessing well enough, and she caught Joe giving her an approving look out of the corner of his eye. Nicky was half smiling at her, which Nile had learned was often more genuine than a full smile from him.

“Now,” Andy said, after opening their eyes, “Nile, eat, here,” and all three of them watched her intently as she tried first a bite of Joe’s latke, then a bite of Andy’s.

Nile chewed. Swallowed.

“I’m sorry, Joe,” she said finally, and the rest of her sentence was drowned out by Andy’s laughing and the clunk as Joe dropped his head down on the table.

“Nile, how could you,” he moaned as Andy clapped Nile so hard on the shoulder that she wheezed, “leaving me all alone with them and their bad taste.”

“They’re just so good with applesauce,” Nile protested, and now Nicky was laughing too. He’d got up to dig something out of the cupboard.

“Here, Nile, try this,” he said, and…

“ _No_ ,” Andy gasped, “Nicolò al-Kaysani, have you lost your _mind,_ put that back!” and Joe doubled over again, except for from laughter this time.

“Just try it, go on,” and Nile couldn’t help but pull a face.

“Nicky, are you out of your mind, I am not putting maple syrup on latkes!”

“One time Booker put powdered sugar on his,” Andy said, disgust plain on their face. “He said it was because it was leftover sugar from the sufganiyot, but there’s no excuse for that behavior.”

“You did kill him for it,” Nicky added. Joe was still laughing in his chair.

“An appropriate response,” Andy said, shrugging.

“I’m glad I’m here with you this year to celebrate,” Nile said softly to Andy as Nicky put the maligned syrup away and they all began to eat. Andy’s contribution to dinner had been the latkes, but it seemed like the guys had made a veritable feast to herald their arrival. “Just let me know when the next holidays are if you want to celebrate with someone.”

Andy looked her up and down. “All right,” they said finally, briefly reaching up to cup their hand around the back of Nile’s neck. “I’ll let you know.”

Nile had thought she needed her family to be truly happy, and she missed them every day. But these people, she thought, looking at Joe laughing and Nicky sneaking bites of Andy’s latkes and Andy throwing cutlery at him in return, all of them careful not to upset the menorah, were all right. They’d be an okay substitution.

**Author's Note:**

> some notes about the aforementioned weirdly niche headcanons: andy and booker are jewish here, andy covers their head when they do any sort of Jewish Things (hence the teatowel moment) and has also departed entirely from the concept of Gender™, and joe has a disability much like my own in which his back simply does not work at prime efficiency due to an irritatingly rare degenerative rheumatoid arthritis that occasionally also causes him great amounts of pain. in this household we project onto our favorites lads
> 
> i do my best in terms of research and preparation for my writing, but doing my best also does not necessarily mean that i have done enough in terms of accurate representation. if you find any errors, no matter what size, and decide to use some of your precious emotional time and energy to correct me, i will be a) honored and humbled that you have chosen to do so and b) make the appropriate revisions as quickly as possible.
> 
> edit: jane_ways has kindly taken the time to provide a thorough breakdown of the different styles and practices associated with different ethnic Jewish groups. i have made the appropriate revisions, and if you are curious, please check out their comment below!
> 
> i hope that you, my dearest reader, are well and healthy, as is your family, and that you are able to celebrate your personal winter holiday as safely and happily as you are able!


End file.
